> bad engineers were always a liability

So. AI Makes good engineers better, more productive and able to deliver well designed systems.

But it makes the bad engineers 10x worse. Before, they had negative productivity in a team environment. Now, its 10x negative productivity. The mess they create as one person might need 10 people (and their AI's) to clean up.

I would also put people who don't know how to code in that bad engineer basket. They would be delivering code they don't understand, accepting unnecessary complexity etc just like your standard bad engineer.